Working papers from the Regional Development Policy Division of the OECD cover a full range of topics including regional statistics and analysis, urban governance and economics, rural governance and economics, and multi-level governance. Depending on the programme of work, the papers can cover specific topics such as regional innovation and networks, the determinants of regional growth or fiscal consolidation at the sub-national level.

The objective of this paper is to better understand how the population growth rates of rural
regions are affected by their closeness to urban regions and by the economic performance of the
latter. By means of a cross-sectional analysis of OECD TL3 regions, it identifies the growth
spillover effects from the net effect of distance to non-rural places. Distance-based measures are
used to approximate the extent to which urban and rural areas are integrated in relational terms.
Results shows that positive growth spillovers exist, suggesting that spread effects overcome
backwash effects and thus that rural regions benefit from the growth process taking place in
urban and intermediate regions. After having controlled for these growth spillovers, the distance
from urban and intermediate regions has a negative effect on the population growth rate of rural
regions. Nevertheless, both the strength of this effect and the growth spillovers decay with
distance. Results further suggest that proximity to urban areas has higher positive influence than
to intermediate areas.